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MOVIES: CRITIC'S CHOICE

YOU don't even have to know who Robert Evans is to love THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE (2002). Maybe you missed Mr. Evans's 1950's acting career (a bullfighter in ''The Sun Also Rises,'' a New York cad in ''The Best of Everything'') and his fashion-industry career (Evan-Picone, a family business). Maybe you didn't know he was head of Paramount Pictures overseeing megahits like ''Chinatown,'' ''Rosemary's Baby,'' ''Love Story'' and ''The Godfather'' or that he suffered a great downfall, accompanied by cocaine. Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein directed this documentary, about the passing of a certain kind of Hollywood glamour, but Mr. Evans, who will be 73 next month, is the star, subject and wonderfully unreliable narrator -- Thursday at 9 p.m. and Thursday/Early Friday at 5:20 a.m. on HBO.

For the two little boys in LOST IN YONKERS (1993), moving in with their grandmother turns out to be less boring than they'd thought. Uncle Louie (Richard Dreyfuss) is always dropping in, hiding out from mobsters (''It's like having a James Cagney movie in your own house,'' says Artie, the younger boy). Aunt Bella (Mercedes Ruehl, who will break your heart) lives with them and is a little mentally confused but full of life and madly in love with a movie usher (David Strathairn). We're all lucky that Neil Simon had such a rich, varied youth to turn into plays and screenplays. The cast also includes Brad Stoll and Mike Damus as the boys and the incomparable Irene Worth as the grandmother. Martha Coolidge directed -- Saturday at 8 p.m. on Channel 9.

Everyone wants Annie Nations to leave her home and the Blue Ridge Mountains she's loved all her life. In Jud Taylor's touching FOXFIRE (1987), ''everyone'' means Annie's son (John Denver, who seems miscast even though he's playing a country music star) and a creepy real estate development man (Gary Grubbs). Luckily Annie (Jessica Tandy) has her dead husband, Hector (Hume Cronyn), to talk to when it comes to making a choice between place and family, and remembering when those were the same thing -- Sunday at 9 p.m. on Hallmark.

Diane Lane was 14 when she made her movie debut in A LITTLE ROMANCE (1979), starting at the top by starring with Laurence Olivier. Ms. Lane plays an American teenager who goes to school in Paris and falls in love with a French boy (Thelonious Bernard) who befriends an elderly pickpocket (Olivier) who accompanies them on a trip to Venice. George Roy Hill directed this sweet if strangely mean-spirited romantic comedy -- Thursday at 6 p.m. on TCM.

Garry Shandling offers Anna Paquin as a sort of sexual CARE package to his friends. ''I found her on an elevator,'' he says of the runaway teenager she plays. ''You want her?'' Kevin Spacey and Sean Penn star as Hollywood housemates in HURLYBURLY (1998), Anthony Drazan's film version of David Rabe's play about casual emotional brutality. Mr. Rabe also wrote the screenplay, which suggests, in the words of Stephen Holden, writing in The New York Times, that ''the war between men and women'' may just be ''an offshoot of a larger and more deadly war, the one waged by men against themselves.'' The ensemble cast, which also includes Chazz Palminteri, Robin Wright Penn and Meg Ryan, is outstanding, but Ms. Ryan still can't read the character-defining line ''I am a drug person'' the way Judith Ivey did on Broadway -- Thursday at 8 and 11:30 p.m. and Saturday at 5:30 p.m. on FX. Anita Gates